Companies in most parts of the world have to follow government regulations and/or company policy about the use of gas detection equipment. Typically, this includes being able to show that they are compliant to these regulations and/or policies. In order to show compliance the safety manager must maintain records about the status of the gas detection equipment, including any operational failures, and be aware of any configuration changes that have been made. This data can be stored as a hardcopy or in an electronic database.
In many situations this data is not easy to collect. For remote or mobile workers in particular, the data is often stored on the gas detection unit or docking equipment and is not easily transferred to the central database storage location for recall and/or review by the safety manager. This means that the data may be infrequently transferred, and the safety manager's records are often not up to date.
Additionally, sometimes there are changes to government regulations or to company policy that require the gas detection unit's configuration be changed (e.g. Alarm set point is lowered to be cautious). For remote or mobile workers, updating these settings can be challenging because the gas detection equipment may infrequently make it back to the office for where the safety manager works so that the equipment can be updated.
Furthermore, the designs of gas detection units have to be certified to be intrinsically safe (IS) so that they can be used in an environment with flammable gas. This inherently places many restrictions on the designs of such units.